Who Owns Your Town?

The Tax Policy Initiative has unveiled a new interactive map which shows all the properties in England & Wales which are owned by overseas entities. Since last year all overseas ownership of UK properties is required to be registered with the land registry and on Companies House. Using this data the Tax Policy Initiative has mapped all English & Welsh properties registered as being owned by foreign entities, allowing you to see who owns foreign owned properties, and in which country they are registered.

Click on a marker on the Interactive Map of All Foreign Entities Holding English Welsh Real Estate and you can see the property's land registry details, the name of the foreign entity owners and a link to their entry on Companies House. 

As the Tax Policy Initiative points out there are many legitimate reasons why a property may be registered as having foreign owners and users should not jump 'to assumptions about tax evasion / avoidance / illegality'. However, while acknowledging that point, it is truly amazing how many overseas owned properties in England and Wales are registered in so called tax havens. 

For the last few years Who Owns England has been diligently trying to discover who owns what land in England, Scotland and Wales. The map is partly an extension of earlier work done by Anna Powell-Smith for the satirical magazine Private Eye on who owns properties registered overseas.

Who Owns England? has also created an interactive map of land owned by UK corporate bodies, councils, UK companies, housing associations and more. This map uses Land Registry data, which shows who owns around 3.5 million land titles. According to Who Owns England? the data shows that "companies and the public sector own around a third of England and Wales". The majority of land is owned by Limited Companies. The second largest category of land owners are local authorities and county councils.

You can discover how much land is owned by private landowners In the United States in Bloomberg's article The Largest Landowners in the US. The article includes a map which shows which land in America is owned privately and who owns it. The map shows that between them the 100 largest owners of private property own 2% of the USA, an area about the size of Florida. The 100 largest landowners are also buying up more land all the time. In fact ten years ago the top 100 landowners owned fewer than 30 million acres. They now own 40 million acres.

If you select a state on Bloomberg's map you can view an annotated overview of the land owned by the state's biggest private landowners. The map also provides a visualization of land owned by America's top 10 landowners.